S6E18 - “Lauren”
Recap by Jen from Wheels Up!
Our episode begins with Prentiss, having just run out on the BAU, arriving at an Irish pub in Boston. She sits in a booth and pulls out the wrapper with the shamrock that Doyle gave her in their most recent face-off. From there, we flashback to 8 years ago in the same bar where Emily (as Lauren Reynolds) first met Ian Doyle. She is posing as an arms dealer seeking to get into business with a man named Valhalla, whom Doyle is familiar with. They then start speaking French to each other and getting a bit flirty.
After the flashback, we return to the BAU, where they have realized that Prentiss is on the run. They are profiling her old team and trying to uncover everything they can about her last mission with Interpol. Reid figures out that her code name when she was undercover was Lauren Reynolds, and that is a jumping-off point for the investigation. Rossi realizes that she kept the connection a secret because Doyle has been targeting families. Since Emily is single and isn’t close with her biological family, she considers the BAU her family and wants to keep them as safe from Doyle as she can.
Back in Boston, Emily uses some interesting tactics to learn some information about Doyle through a local bar rat named Fahey. At the same time, Hotch calls in some reinforcements for help on the case. The reinforcements? JJ-fresh from the State Department. Emily is able to extract key info about Doyle’s info by holding a gun to Fahey’s head, and just before the opening credits roll, we see her gun go off.
At the BAU, JJ is briefing the team on what she knows about Emily’s involvement with a special operation for the JTF unit of Interpol and that Doyle was the target of her last case before the team disbanded. Jeremy Wolff, Sean McAllister, and Tsia Moseley are all dead, and now only Emily and the JTF unit leader Clyde Easter remain, though Easter is apparently on the lam. JJ also reveals that Emily went undercover to get to Doyle because recon on him showed that she was his type. Rossi and Derek then visit Emily’s apartment, and Derek shares that he feels a bit betrayed that Emily left, especially after they had just gotten shot at in the last episode by Doyle’s men. But Rossi thinks his anger is more rooted in the fact that Emily crossed the line with Doyle (aka, she slept with a terrorist??).
While at the apartment, they find her real passport, and Derek continues to be very dramatic about how he can’t say he ever really knew Emily blah blah blah, and then they find the necklace that Emily flushed. Rossi explains that it is actually a gimmel ring, which is something worn during an engagement by a husband and wife-to-be. Meanwhile, Emily has found the warehouse where Doyle and his men are hiding out, and we see another flashback, this time to Northern Ireland. An arms trade is taking place where Doyle’s right-hand man tells him Lauren is too good to be true because no one else has ever been able to get them weapons that good. Doyle sends Lauren to the car and says that he will “take care of her”. In the car, Lauren and Ian have a very…sultry? Convo, where they share a kiss, and Ian asks her why she never asks him about his business or Valhalla. Lauren tells him that she figured he would tell her when he was ready to tell her. And then Ian pulls out the gimmel ring and tells her that he is Valhalla. He tells her that he has no idea what kind of life they will have but that he wants her to be his.
Now back to the present, Garcia locates Clyde Easter boarding a flight to Boston, and the team decides to meet him at the airport. Hotch has Easter detained, and in his luggage is a very large amount of cash. Emily is once again staking out the bar where she first met Doyle when she receives a voicemail from Garcia on her phone. The voicemail is really sweet and is basically pleading with Emily to come home, and Emily gets emotional listening to it, and honestly, me too, girl. But then she sees DOyle exiting to bar and plans a quick strike. She shoots into the car and sets off a flash bang, but Doyle was not in the car yet, so he comes up behind her and shoots her when she faces him. She’s wearing a vest, so she’s not seriously hurt, but Doyle now has her. When the BAU is reviewing the footage from her assault, Derek is like, “She threw a flash bang into a car,” and “Three people could’ve been killed,” and “Is nobody else bothered by that?” and then Rossi says, “well, three bad guys.”
So now Emily is tied up in Doyle’s warehouse, and he pulls open her shirt and prepares to brand her with a four-leaf clover. While this is going down, the BAU has tracked down Fahey, the mole from the mob, but Doyle’s men find out quickly. The right-hand man Liam urges Doyle to kill Emily, so they have time to flee, but Emily tells Doyle that she knows what he wants and that she can be Lauren Reynolds again. Meanwhile, Hotch interrogates Easter, and Rossi and Reid talk to Fahey, but Fahey is only going to talk for a price. While they try to figure out what they can do to pay him, Seaver presents the idea of getting him the smoke he’s been asking for because that might get him to talk. Hotch asks if she thinks she can get him to talk, and Seaver says, “I’m pretty good with narcissists. Dated a few.”
Back to Doyle and Emily, who are replaying the night they first met. They are at the art where they’re speaking French to each other when Emily asks him to take the handcuffs off of her and is trying to talk sweetly to get into his head. Doyle isn’t fooled and has Liam, the right-hand man Liam, pull out a video feed of Fahey’s conversation with Seaver and Rossi while he takes his smoke break on the roof. Apparently, there’s a sniper a few buildings away who threatens to shoot them. Emily convinces them to just shoot Fahey because if he dies, the trail to Doyle goes away and her team doesn’t have anything. That was obviously what Doyle had hoped Emily might say because he says, “Hello, Lauren. Good to see you again.” So clearly, there was some ruthlessness required of Prentiss during her time undercover. They oblige and shoot Fahey.
Rossi realizes that without Fahey, they don’t have much to go on, so he relies on Seaver to get a fresh perspective since she’s known Emily for the shortest time. Rossi pushes her to say what doesn’t add up to her about the case, and Seaver lands on families. Why was Doyle targeting families to get back at Emily? From there, Garcia and JJ find out that it was Jeremy who had sold out the team to Doyle, and Hotch uses that to get more from Easter. They decide to combine forces, but Easter warns him about how dangerous Doyle is and says that the only way to truly catch Doyle is to kill him. When Easter reviews the case with the team, they find that the way Doyle executed the children in these recent cases could mean that they are surrogates for his own child. However, Easter claims that Doyle didn’t have any children.
Doyle has now decided to kill Emily and tells her it is time for her last confession when Emily tells him to “take her to where he died”, which gets Doyle to untie her. We see another flashback where Lauren is playing hide and seek with an adorable blonde boy in Doyle’s compound. He is at first introduced as the housekeeper’s son, but Doyle reveals that the boy is his son. He had passed Declan off as Louise’s son instead so that no one could use Declan against him. He wants Lauren to marry him and be Declan’s mother. He offers to get her out of the life, and she offers the same, but Ian wants Declan to be raised to take over his life as an arms dealer. Lauren tells him that she would do a lot of things to make Ian happen, but she wouldn’t do that.
After the flashback, Doyle tells Emily that the North Koreans used everything the JTF team gave to them about him, which included pictures of Declan and Louise being murdered, and that’s how he knew it was Emily who had sold him out. Apparently, the warehouse was very intentional because it was where the photo of Declan was taken before he was killed. So now Doyle plans to kill Emily in that same place. Just before he shoots him, Emily tells Doyle there is something he needs to know about those photos.
Back with the BAU, Garcia has identified Declan from the case file, and she uncovers the photos that were taken from Louise and Declan’s shooting. She is able to find the location of the warehouse. Meanwhile, Emily is recounting what happened after she left Doyle’s compound. She had learned that Interpol had included the notes about Declan in the profile and that he would be used as a pon and was not safe. So she had to “end his suffering before it could begin”. That leads Doyle to slap her as she continues to tell him that she only put Declan in the profile after the pictures from his death had been taken. At the same time, Garcia is with Spencer and Morgan when they notice that the hand of the shooter has chewed nails, meaning that the person who killed Declan and Louise was Emily. That’s when Emily reveals that she knew exactly what happened to Declan because she was the one holding the gun in the photos.
Doyle goes apeshit while Emily taunts him, but then realizes that the murders had been staged. Declan and Louise had been relocated, and Emily never saw him again. As this is happening, the BAU begins its raid of the warehouse. Emily continues to fight with him, stalling for as long as she could. However, when they cut the power in the warehouse, Doyle is able to regain the upper hand and impales Emily with a piece of wood. He tries to get Emily to tell him where Declan is, but she won’t. While taking out Doyle’s right-hand man, the man’s hand was on the trigger of his gun, sparing gunshots everywhere. That alerted Doyle to the BAU’s presence, and he flees. Morgan gets to Emily, frantically calls for help, and he tells her that he knows what she did for Declan and that he was proud of her, but she eventually loses consciousness.
At the hospital, JJ alerts the team that Emily never made it off the table. However, she and Hotch secretly exchange words behind closed doors. The next scene is Emily’s funeral, with the team carrying her casket and laying flowers for her. Everyone is pretty torn up, but there’s still a weird energy between JJ and Hotch, who continue to share looks. This all comes together when JJ is walking toward a Parisian cafe and hands a manilla envelope to a brunette woman who we only see from behind, with passports from three different countries and a bank account in each one to keep the woman comfortable. The woman grabs the envelope, and we see that she has chewed fingernails, so it is undeniably Prentiss. She thanks JJ and gets up and walks away, the Eiffel tower in the distance.
If there was any doubt left that Prentiss’ death had been staged, the closing quote is, “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. And if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”
Rating Criteria:
Criminal/Serial Killer: 20/20
Character development/ character arcs: 20/20
Forensics/Context: 20/20
Script writing: 20/20
Background characters: 20/20
Overall: 100/100